JUST AS A little point of information for you movie fans out there, often studios have an inkling that a movie they've spent lots of money making isn't completely, altogether, entirely, well, good. Usually when that is the case, they spend a great deal more money flying journalists all over the country to junkets where they put them in fancy hotel rooms, wine and dine them, show them the movie, and let them talk to the stars and director for a minute or two.

In other words, they ignore how bad the thing is and proceed as if nothing were wrong. But there are gradations of badness. When a movie is terribly bad, the studios postpone screening it for the press until the night before the opening, leaving little time for papers with early deadlines to run a review on opening day (usually a Friday). The studio hopes to enjoy an opening weekend with no bad reviews to influence the public.

Now, when a movie is really, really bad, they don't screen it at all. Reviewers must go to the theaters on Friday and run back to the office to write for Saturday, a day many people don't see a newspaper.

This was the case with "The Avengers."

Let me just say that I can't argue with the studio's reasoning.

Based on the 1960s cult television series about two urbane and appealing British secret agents for The Ministry starring Patrick Macnee and (mostly) Diana Rigg, the movie is a dismal and misguided special-effects romp featuring two of the deadest performances recorded this year so far.

Ralph Fiennes stars as John Steed, the man with the bowler hat, umbrella and bullet-proof three-piece suits. Uma Thurman plays Mrs. Peel, a martial-arts expert with a penchant for tight leather costumes and tight-lipped badinage.

It doesn't help that the dialogue, written by Don Macpherson, is some of the lamest I've heard since my best friend in the fourth grade learned how to make a pun.

The TV series posed an alternative to the James Bondian shoot-'em-up sort of action. It gave us agents who used wit, intelligence and an air of superiority to best their foes. With Fiennes and Thurman in the leads, I think the strategy in the movie is to bore their enemies into submission.

Scenes between the two seem to go on forever while they quietly utter inanities as if the lines were funny. At one point they walk through a maze and Mrs. Peel remarks that it's "amazing."

Fiennes and Thurman are dark, dry, rigid and affectless. I think the "Alice in Wonderland" quality of the TV series has been replaced here by a sensibility more familiar with the 1960s "Batman" TV show. Holy Stiff Upper Lip!

Sean Connery is August De Wynter, a former Ministry employee currently gone mad and threatening to rule the world's weather unless everyone pays him to make it sunny. His obsession is the occasion for director Jeremiah Chechik (is it possible he made the lovely "Benny and Joon" ?) displaying the kind of special effects that belong in "Twister" and seem absurdly out of place here.

The TV series was a character-driven entertainment about two charming spies. The movie is an idiocy-driven 90 minutes of torture dreamed up by people who have no new ideas of their own, but who believe that even when they steal old ideas, they can do them better than the smart people who thought them up first.